Re: [contacts] Re: proposition d' action eu ropéenn e : financement d' un cabinet de lobbyingprofessionnel

[Jean-Marc Le Peuvédic <cocktails@freesurf.fr>]

Seth Johnson wrote:

> Francois Letellier wrote:
>  
>
> > What about a novel, smart-card based secure payment system?
> > (anti-flame comment: this is not a troll, but a good faith question -- if
> > one can answer why such a thing is not a "computer / implemented /
> > invention", it's worth a paper in a magazine for bankers!)
> >    
One of the easiest ways to reach a wrong interpretation is to wrongly 
understand the word invention. For most of us, invention means 
"patentable subject matter" (implies that it doesn't fall in one of the 
categories excluded from patentable subject matter, like business 
methods). For the EPO it only means that the claims have technical 
characteristics, which is always, or can always be, the case since they 
would even accept "pen and paper"-implemented inventions as far as 
business methods are concerned.

Your proposed payment cannot really be discussed because you should try 
to formulate it as a patent claim, not a general description. Since 
paying is a logical operation (and a business method, too), my personal 
opinion is that as a whole this is a software patent. You are attempting 
to patent some particular arrangement of a few logical transfer 
function, some of which are known, some of which may be new (but all are 
pure sw).

Moreover, the description part of the patent helps to define the terms, 
which you haven't done here. We are back to the "Microsoft limited 
resources computing platform" syndrome, which, as some people here 
pointed, is any computer, since no current computer can crack 2048 bit 
crypto keys in zero time.

My conclusion is that you are trying to get a software patent, and if 
that is not your intent, then you should be more specific and narrow 
your claim(s).

Jean-Marc Le Peuvédic